they ask every outgoing senior, incoming alum to submit to the red book. a guestbook of messages compiled for our graduating class, five years past commencement. this iteration comes five years premature, because the 2020 of it all demands recompense for the goodbyes we never got to have. some day, someone might pry out this paperback volume from a box within a box in their attic. they may skim through the pages of former classmates turned acquaintances turned strangers. it is a tomb, a time-capsule. perhaps they’ll stop at my name and read on page 156; perhaps they’ll find it here:
📕
I once heard that college sculpts a person like peeling a hard-boiled egg. We begin as a messy mixture of yolk and albumen—still raw and impressionable. College submerges us into boiling hot water and pressure cooks us: the proteins denature and all the soft, amorphous parts of us at eighteen will harden by the time we’re twenty-one. These years change us irrevocably and the laws of biology say this is an irreversible reaction; we can never go back to who we thought we were before. College beats and pries apart every piece of us until we fracture and break open. Whatever sticks by the time the egg emerges from the shell is the version of us that lasts.
Think of everything that has stuck with you all this time.
These are the things that have stuck with me: the endless meals and hours spent in Mather dining hall; the conversations with friends that continued through the a.m.; and the moments in-between when I walked through the Yard full of wonder and gratitude for my time here. I might not feel it now, but someday I know I will: all at once, all of a sudden, I will miss everything.